Keywords: Ecocriticism - Plant Studies - Petro-Cultures - Goethe
Affiliation: Trinity University
As a material ecocritic, I focus on multispecies entanglements in bodies and the world. My work features texts of the Anthropocene from Goethe and the Romantics through contemporary science fiction. I’m currently working on a critical plant studies project entitled the “Dark Green: Plants, People, Power” that considers how plants function as the basis of our living worlds and thus how we humans and other large beings fully depend on the green. The dark quality emerges from two sides: first, from the human treatment of vegetal beings in the Anthropocene that includes deforestation, pesticides, modern fossil-fueled industrial agriculture, genetic modification, control of seed production by a few massive corporations, and more. The second side of the “dark” is the truth of our full and inescapable reliance on plants, and their algal cousins in the Earthly waters, to produce oxygen and (most) all our food or food for the animals that we consume; modern individualistic subjects rarely agree without horror to seeing themselves being dependent upon and not free from the influence of anything, but especially from the seemingly passive and yet massively powerful eaters-of-light, the vegetal beings. My work includes studies of Goethe’s botany, Fairy-Tale forests, the radioactive gardens of Christa Wolf, Alina Bronsky, and Gudrun Pausewang, the imagined plant lives and plant horror of modern science fiction, and the petro-culture’s denial of their own plant dependency (fossil fuels are primarily fossils of ancient plants).